


Nugatory Work

by That_One_Kid6626



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: F/M, Gore, Kidnapping, Rape/Non-con Elements, Starving, Stockholm Syndrome, slow burn (?)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:15:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_One_Kid6626/pseuds/That_One_Kid6626
Summary: Tim gets lonely when Brian has to leave to handle work
Relationships: Timothy Wright/Reader Masky/Reader
Comments: 7
Kudos: 29





	1. Chapter 1

It wasn’t really pain you felt. Just a thundering ache of your skull. The feeling of a pipe (Crowbar?) hitting against your cranium is an unmistakable sensation. It makes your teeth chatter and your body surge upwards. There’s a single moment of clarity before your body hits the ground. Somethings wrong. And you sit there in inky blackness, shivering, waiting to see just exactly how wrong this something is. Maybe this was karma for your stupid decisions. You always saw the news; those girls getting kidnapped and you always told yourself it would never in a million years be you. It couldn’t. Because you carried pepper spray and you kept to the dimly lit sidewalk and you didn’t go out at night and you didn’t wear revealing clothing. But pepper spray doesn’t do much when you didn’t even hear footsteps behind you.  
Wearing sneakers instead of pumps didn’t give you an advantage when your mind didn’t even have time to send out a single danger signal to your mind.  
You wish you could say that you woke up with your mind racing trying to find any evidence of where you were, what time it was, or where your things were. But, as you rolled onto your back to get more comfortable on the sheet that was below you, you couldn’t.  
You laid there thinking about barely anything at all. Your brain dimly raised the question about serious head trauma; you could die from bleeding in your brain. You’d seen enough Grey’s Anatomy to know that. But for some reason you didn’t think that was happening. All you felt was that aching. But now it was all throughout your head; not just on the base of your skull. You’d had a concussion before; it felt the same as this. It didn’t feel as though time was passing. It felt like you were just stuck there, at this exact moment in time, recuperating.  
You’d always thought of yourself as a fighter. Sitting there, watching crime shows eating popcorn and listening to these detectives recall the kidnapping murder and rape of thousands of women.  
And you’d laugh.  
You’d scrunch your nose up at the thought of going without a fight. And now you just felt fucking stupid. Because this guy probably didn’t even break a sweat. Your delirious, possibly blood-soaked brain, told you this probably wasn’t his first time. It happened so, so fast. It was probably over in seconds.  
Like when you watch a nature documentary. You can tell if the lion is going to catch what it’s hunting in the first few seconds of the chase. Did the animal know? Did that zebra or Buffalo know, in those short first few seconds, if it would die or live? You didn’t. You became aware of the restricted movements of your hands when you tried to crack the knuckles in your hand out of habit.  
Rope. No. This was too smooth. Zip ties. Yes. Bleary eyes looked down at your hands. They were balled into fists. It must have been hours since you got there now. The sunlight had faded; it made it easier to look around. Just by observing the surrounding room you couldn’t tell for sure if there was someone living here. It was tile. You were laying on a blanket that was on top of tile.  
Kitchen tile. The smell was what told you there was someone else here. It smelled like sweat. And it could have very well been you, but you knew for a fact you put deodorant on before you left the house and whoever had the balls to kidnap you in broad daylight had only nabbed you at most thirty minutes after that. You couldn’t do anything more. Pushing aside the torn blanket, you put your face to the cold floor. You didn’t sleep, but you laid there like a corpse. Even when you heard footsteps above you. You just laid there.


	2. The Man

Kitchens should have water. That’s just a basic thing that kitchens should have. Kitchens should have water flowing through the sink, inside of the refrigerator, maybe even ice cubes in the freezer. 

Nothing about the situation you were in, though, had any semblance of normalcy. 

So you really shouldn’t of expected the flow of water when you turned the tap on. But you did. And you were disappointed to hear the silence that followed the turning of the tap. Your weak and sluggish body stumbled to the refrigerator and pulled it open. 

It worked. A light flicked on and you could feel the cold air caressing your flushed cheeks. 

You tried your best to take an inventory of the items inside of it. Beer; the cheap kind the guys in the apartment beside you drank. The kind kids pooled their money for and asked a stranger to go in and buy it for them. An apple. Granola bars; some half eaten. Bottles of water. Water. Clumsily reaching forward, you reached down and tried to pull the water to you but it snagged on something. Inspecting closer, you realized that it was in a pack of four connected by those plastic rings; the kind you saw in those adds strangling sea turtles. Sitting down slowly as to not agitate your calming headache, you pulled the pack from the fridge and put your foot on the side of the bottle beside the one you gripped. Pulling with your hands, you pushed it upwards. 

It didn’t give the first time. And, embarrassingly, you almost gave up then and there. You were fucking thirsty. And tired. And hungry. And confused. And pissed off. You just wanted this water. But with another agonizing try you pulled it free. It was gone in seconds. The cold liquid slipped down your throat into your stomach. Repeating the same process with a different water bottle; you finally felt satisfied. For now. 

You managed to put the now pack of two waters back into the refrigerator and shut the dirty white door. The man who brought you here, you were sure it was a man since you had seen clothes scattered around the house and heard the heavy footsteps, had quieted last night. You assumed he went to bed wherever he slept. He was probably sleeping. Which meant......

Your head turned towards the door. You hadn’t gotten the chance to fight when he knocked you out cold but maybe now you could make up for it. Standing shakily, you gripped the grimy white tile countertop for support. You hadn’t walked in a full day; your legs felt like a freshly born fawns. You stood there for a few moments. Regaining strength; feeling. But eventually you felt stable enough to move towards the door that was separating the kitchen from the rest of the house. 

Gripping the doorknob, you turned the sphere of metal. It wasn’t locked. Holy shit it wasn’t locked. Your heart thumped against your rib cage with passion and adrenaline. The wooden door creaked open, and your heart dropped into the pits of your stomach. 

He wasn’t standing there menacingly with a chainsaw or a bloody machete or doing something weird. He was just sitting on the couch that had been repositioned to face the door of the kitchen. Calm. Maybe a little bit bored. 

He was big. And not in a fat way. You couldn’t tell how tall he was because he was sitting but he looked about six foot something. White. And his scarred hand could probably cover your entire face. The shade of his hair could easily be mistaken for black in the lighting but it was just a deep brown. He was wearing normal clothes for a kidnapper; dirty blue jeans, leather boots, a black shirt, and a plain tan jacket. The only thing that was odd about his physical appearance was that he was wearing a mask. 

A normal person could excuse the dirty hair, the dirty clothes, and the unkempt nails that had dirt underneath them. But there was no normal person explanation for the mask. It wasn’t even close to Halloween. It was winter. 

It was a simple design. Black, almost feminine lips were painted onto it. Surprised eyebrows. And the rims of the almond shaped eyes were also painted that same black. 

You weren’t scared. You didn’t have enough energy to be scared. Your hands were steady; your heart thumped quietly. “Oh.” You croaked out. The voice that came out of you was almost unrecognizable to your regular one. It must have been the not talking for at least a day; and the thirst. The man raised his head; he has been looking down at the floor before. You wished you could say that this was some sort of a greeting; an acknowledgement of your presence. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like the total and absolute opposite of that. You didn’t feel his gaze on you. It was like you were just another object in the room. Not someone he’d kidnapped and brought here for.. some sort of purpose. You hadn’t found that out yet. 

Think. What to do. You looked around the room. There was a boarded up window behind the man; but it looked like the glass of the window had been smashed. The door, presumably to exit the house, was to your right. It was not boarded up. It has two locks; one on the handle and one above it. You returned your eyes to the man. The only indication that he was alive and not just a corpse sitting in the couch was the fact that his chest slowly rose and fell with his breathing; and the fact that his head moved when you came out of the kitchen. 

Unsure of what to do, you flexed your fingers and thought. You couldn’t run now. The door was probably locked and in the few seconds that it would take to unlock them he would drag you away. You’d have to try when he was gone or sleeping. If he slept. Dry eyes looked over at the empty spot on the couch opposite to where the masked guy was sitting; he was on the complete right side of the couch leaning against the armrest. 

Those cop shows. Those ‘what to do if you get kidnapped by a psycho.’ Videos. Think. What did they tell you? What did those women you made fun of for being obsessed about this kind of thing say to do? 

You couldn’t remember. But treating your kidnapper like a monster definitely wouldn’t help. You’d dealt with psychotic men before and it didn’t end well if you treated them like an animal. And you knew your body wouldn’t be able to survive a beating right now. 

On shaky legs, you walked and sat down on the couch as far away as you could from the Man. He moved his head to follow you around the room with his eyes but he still never saw you. Never truly acknowledged another person was in the room. It felt weird. 

“H-hello..” Your voice sounded childish. Repulsive to your own ears. You sounded like a victim. Which, obviously, you were but you were ready to accept that yet. There was still time for you to wake up in your bed and to have this all be a very weird dream. 

He didn’t talk. He didn’t look like he even knew you were speaking. But he kept his eyes on you. The eyes you couldn’t see because they were shrouded by the mask and the darkness of the room. But he did move closer to you. You hated it, but you froze. Did he have something you didn’t see? A knife? A chloroform rag? Was he going to choke you? He was reaching toward you with his hands the same hands he used to grip the base of the metal that knocked you unconscious he was reaching toward you to choke you and kill you and get rid of you- 

Hair. He was reaching for your face to move some brittle hair out of your face. The Man tucked it behind your ear. The simple, almost affectionate gesture left you quivering and breathing hard. 

He chuckled. He chuckled quietly behind that plastic mask. 

He had a sense of humor. And the sense of humor was making women you grabbed off the street think you were going to murder them and instead moving some hair out of their face. Great. 

You must have waken up near the end of the day because the room only got darker. And eventually he grabbed your wrists by the zip ties and put you back in the kitchen. Without another glance, he shut the door. You heard a click. 

A feeling of annoyance flickered in you. The first spark of anger. But you went to bed anyways; you slept on that musty smelling blanket on the cold hard floor. Because what else were you supposed to do?


	3. Thing

He didn’t feed you. 

At first you thought this was out of malice; he wanted to see you wither away. He gained pleasure by watching you cry and writhe in pain. This was true, of course, but he was confused as to why you were in pain. He didn’t remember he actually had to feed you to keep you alive until he saw what you were going for when you tried to open the refrigerator. 

You quickly came to realize that living with this man was like living with a rabid dog in your apartment. The only words in your head that you could use to accurately describe this behavior was animalistic. Territorial. He didn’t let you open the refrigerator anymore; you had to ask for it. And there was always a chance he’d ignore you or refuse what you asked for. He let you walk to and from the bathroom; under close supervision. Thank god he didn’t actually watch you use the toilet or anything but he followed you closely. If he heard you open the refrigerator without his permission he’d storm in. Like a dog protecting a meatless bone. He never hit you. He’d just use his boot to kick you back down onto the thin blanket on the tile floor. 

You were terrified of this man and he never even had to hit you to invoke the trembling that came over you when he looked down at you. 

He’d feed you. Not just by giving you the food; he’d literally feed you. The man would either sit down beside you and feed you small pieces of apple or granola or pull you towards the dirty couch and lay with his back pressed against the armrests and have your back on top of his chest while he fed you. 

Once, while he was doing this, you began to think (You had begun to do this more often as the fairly frequent food gave you enough energy to do so). Maybe he was really, really crazy and thought you were his wife. Or his child. That would explain why he gave you such little freedom and why he fed you. Maybe he thought you were his family. That would decrease the chances he’d try to defile you, right? If it kept him off of your naked body, let him believe you’re his kid or whatever he wants. 

The more you sat there thinking, graciously accepting the chewy granola from the mans thick fingers, the quicker it took for the realization to come to you. 

He didn’t believe you to be his kid. Fathers wouldn’t laugh at their kids fear. This guy kept you tied up. He denied you food sometimes; he fucking kidnapped you off of the street. He didn’t go anywhere; not that you could tell. He stayed here, watching you walk on egg shells around him. And he enjoyed it. He enjoyed scaring you. There was a word for this type of person; a complete psychopath. 

How didn’t you make this blatantly obvious connection earlier? You had studied abnormal psychology for a year at college before having to drop out. 

Think. This new information; it had to mean something. It had to change something. 

Psychopaths don’t see people as people. They see them as things. Objects. That’s obviously how this.. guy sees you; he controls when and what you eat, how you eat it, what you drink and what you do. He makes you rely on him for everything. 

You remembered something. As another piece of granola passed from his fingers to your lips you remembered a news story. A girl that had escaped from a mans basement; she’d truly flirted with death. Barely escaped with her life. She had to have done hundreds of interviews and you briefly watched one; but the information could help. It was a documentary called “How I Survived.” 

The title was pretty self explanatory. 

The girl said she realized the guy thought of her as a toy. Something to have some fun with and then dispose of. But she talked to him. He told her stories and she laughed at them when it was polite. She told him stories. She told him about trivial, daily human life. Because she was a human. And he began to see her as that. And that’s what saved her life. Bought her time. 

So you did that. You told him stories. 

Over the next few days that’s all you did other than eat and drink and sleep for hours and hours. You told him about how you bounced around from house to house; your grand parents, your moms, your dads, back to your moms again. You never had a home but had a room in pretty much every family members house. 

You told him about the time your mom came up short for your prom dress so she had to ask strangers in the store to fill in the extra $20 that she didn’t have. 

When you laid there, having lost count of exactly how many days it had been since he took you here, with your chest to his back you thought about many things. When you weren’t telling him stories you tried to think. One day, after having gone a while without water, you wondered what kind of object he thought of you as. Were you a doll? Or a vase? If you were a vase; was it one of those beautiful fragile ones you put flowers in? Or an ugly one you turned your nose up at at the goodwill? 

It was more comforting to see yourself as a doll. 

“Once,” You felt his body underneath you twitch a little. Maybe he was surprised you started talking. “I went to a funeral with my mom. Her dad died. And.. I couldn’t cry.” Your voice was dry. Your tongue felt like it welled up in your mouth, making it harder to speak. “And when we got home she screamed at me. She told me I was heartless; because I couldn’t cry. She sent me to my dads.”

There was something in your hair. If you could, you would have reached up and swatted at it. But your hands felt numb from the tightness of the zip ties. You’d have to ask him to remove them later; you didn’t want to loose your hands. You soon realized it wasn’t a bug or lint that was in your hair. It was his fingers. The man had put his hand in your hair. In your right state of mind you would have been grossed out by him putting a grimy hand in your hair; but you weren’t. 

You wished you could say that this was comforting. That you felt that this was a friendly gesture. 

It didn’t feel that way. 

You couldn’t relax. You couldn’t make yourself feel like he was being kind. It felt like a reminder of his power over you. And a reminder of just how lowly he saw you as. A toy. A thing. A thing he could jerk around if he wanted to. 

You really hoped he saw you as his child. But the way he started looking at you scared you; and maybe if he thought you were his daughter it would get you some leniency. 

Before you went to bed that night he cut the zip ties off. You stayed up all night massaging your wrists to encourage blood flow.


	4. Pulse

The man did odd things. 

At first it was odd things he’d do with his body; occasionally it looked like he had muscle spasms powerful enough to crack his neck, elbows, and knuckles. You’d sit there on the couch across from him (when he’d allow you to sit that far from himself) and watch as he spasmed seemingly at random intervals; it happened rarely enough that it would startle you when you felt the sudden shift in weight on the couch. You assumed he didn’t do this consciously; it was just something that happened. You had noticed also that he would take pills throughout the day. Maybe this was to minimize the spasms? He would go upstairs and come back down with a small white bottle with the label scratched off. The purpose of the pills were unknown to you however much you pondered; they could have been tic tac’s for all you knew. 

The mans name continues to be a mystery to you. He didn’t talk, at all, so it was impossible to try and maintain any semblance of conversation much less asking personal questions. 

Time was a concept you were beginning to lose your grasp on. With this new feeling, a feeling that you were a being trapped in this timeless place in a tucked away corner of space, you had a lot of time to think. And sleep. You did a lot of both. New questions arose every day: why did this man keep you here? He did nothing to you. You gave him nothing. Why did he rarely leave this building? Was he completely off the grid? Was this is home, or just an abandoned building he slept in?

You spent a lot of time observing what he would do when he wasn’t sitting like a stone statue; unmoving and cold. You thought that maybe if you watched carefully enough you could find the answers to these secrets he seemed to guard so carefully 

The man had habits; he wasn’t completely unpredictable. You were thankful for this. At times you would wake up to him sitting on the countertop eating something; most of the times an apple or a granola bar. He never offered you any. The mysterious male would just sit there and you would listen to the chewing and crunching until he was done and either left or roughly pulled you up and led you into the living room. Most of the time he was doing the same things; sitting, watching, eating. You would have added ‘listening’ to that list but how could you tell if he listened to the hundreds of stories you told him? He never made any indication he cared or was paying attention. The only indication that he wasn’t deaf was that he heard when you opened the refrigerator door and when you needed to use the restroom. 

Currently your body was reclining on the fusty couch. The mind attached to your brain was somewhere far off in the distance; blanketed by cold fog that enveloped your mind. You were vaguely aware of a few things; the man was sitting on the floor by the kitchen door and it was nighttime evidenced by the fact that sunlight was no longer streaming through the boarded up windows anymore. 

None of those things really mattered though, did they? It was just the same scenery that had manifested yesterday and the dark days before that. The only things that changed were the stories you told and where the man was sitting. Everything remained mostly the same. 

And it was infuriating. 

Your head lolled to the side, your hazy eyes staring at the figure sitting on the floor. Sitting on the beige carpet that smelled faintly of some sort of liquid someone spilled long ago. Standing slowly as to not cause a sudden rush of light headedness, you stepped towards the man. His stature was still intimidating even though you felt like you had spent a considerable amount of time with him; when you stood in front of him and looked down at him he lifted his head to meet your eyes. 

He looked tired. 

Nevertheless, you needed to do something. The haze that your mind was in was unbearable. It caused even the slightest of your movements to feel like it caused an exponential draining of your energy; like you were underwater and had to work against the liquid to move. Your eyes met his and you stared down at him as he looked up at you. Perhaps he expected you to tell him another story. “What are you doing? What do you do?” Your voice was close to what it had normally been since you had been talking frequently. “What I mean is.. is this all you do? Just sit in this dump and.. what? Think? Listen to me talk on and on?” There was no indication that he was annoyed or upset by your tone. He didn’t huff or grunt or move his head to break eye contact. But you knew there was a rising anger in his stomach. You could feel the air around him starting to sour. 

You continued. 

“What kind of freak are you?” The man himself was unsure of what exactly set him off; what lit the match. What knocked that first domino over. The insult? Most likely. But it could have been the throbbing headache in his temple that grew with every word that left your lips, or possibly it was that defiant tone. It may just have been the day; the stars aligning in a certain way. Whatever it was, it made his hand snap outwards and wrap around your thin throat. 

It caused you to stumble forward, as he had pulled you towards him once his calloused fingers matched onto the vulnerable, pulsing skin. Both of your hands were on his shoulders, and your knees were bent. It was an awkward stance; it made your knees and back ache from the hunched over position. 

You could breathe, he made sure of this, but it was still terrifying. It sent your heart rate skyrocketing and the rush of adrenaline cleared your head. Danger signals were pounding throughout your entire body as you stared down at the clearly pissed off man. His fingers flexed over where your pulse were; this shot tingling sensations down your throat to your chest. 

After a few seconds he shoved you backwards by your neck, huffing quietly behind his mask. 

You landed on your ass, coughing and struggling to regain a normal breathing pattern. This was the first time he actually hurt you. 

A minute after this he grabbed you roughly by your arm and shoved you into the kitchen. You heard shuffling and soon something was propped up against the door. Trapping you. Again. 

As you laid there, on the decaying blanket covering a small piece of the tile floor, one thought penetrated the mist enveloping your mind. 

Brown. His eyes were brown. 

Inky blackness crept up from your feet to your head and you willingly submitted to sleep.


End file.
